Court Upholds Limits On Prisoners' Rights

May 16, 1989|By Knight-Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Prison officials have broad powers to decide which visitors inmates may see and which publications they may read, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The justices concluded in a Kentucky case that officials may bar visitors from state prisons - including members of an inmate's immediate family - without justification or explanation. They also decided that federal officials have wide latitude to bar prisoners from receiving publications they consider "detrimental" to prison discipline.

The two rulings, on identical 6-3 votes that triggered strongly worded dissents, were in line with a Supreme Court trend in the 1980s of limiting the constitutional rights of inmates to ensure order in the prisons.

Justice John Paul Stevens, a leading critic of the high court's recent trend, denounced Monday's censorship ruling as "a headlong rush to strip inmates of all but a vestige of free communication with the world beyond the prison gate."

The visitation decision, wrote Justice Thurgood Marshall, means that Kentucky officials - whose position drew support from 32 other states - "are free to deny prisoners visits from parents, spouses, children, clergy members and close friends for any reason whatsoever, or for no reason at all.

Justice William J. Brennan Jr. joined the Stevens and Marshall dissenting opinions.

Blackmun also upheld U.S. Bureau of Prisons regulations in the publication censorship case, Thornburgh vs. Abbott. To be valid, such rules need only be "reasonably related to legitimate penological interests," Blackmun said.